CIPHR webinar – gender pay gap reporting

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Good morning and welcome to the CIPHR Gender Pay Gap Reporting webinar. Thanks everyone for attending today’s session. My name is Ben Underwood, customer experience manager here at CIPHR. So, today I’ll be covering a very brief overview of the U.K. mandatory gender pay gap reporting requirements, a demonstration of the CIPHR gender pay gap reports and how this can help to bring your reporting down to just a few clicks of a mouse, and finally, a short Q&A session if time allows.

Okay. So, I suspect the reason many of you have joined this morning is that you’ve heard of the Gender Pay Gap Information Regulations 2017. These came into force on the 6th of April this year, 2017. This requires all employers with more than 250 employees to publish the following six pieces of information annually. So, these are the difference between the main hourly rates of pay for male and female employees, the difference between the median hourly rates of pay for the same group, the difference between the main bonus pay, pays to male and female employees, and the difference between the median bonus pay, paid to the same group, the proportions of male and female relevant employees who were paid a bonus, and lastly, the proportions of male and female relevant employees who were in the relevant quartile pay bands. Without the right solution in place, producing these six pieces of information has the potential to become a real headache and quite an administrative burden year-on-year.

Certainly there will be some of you who’ve already begun the process, collecting the information and producing the figures. And you probably have found by now that the formulas are complex, they have changed since the draft was originally put together as well. And really, what today’s session about is how CIPHR can help make that process much, much easier. So, I won’t go into any more detail about the requirements themselves, the regulations, in this session. There’s many other guides out there and training courses available from organizations such as ACRES, which cover that far more succinctly and in more detail than I ever could.

So, how can CIPHR help? We’ve created a CIPHR gender pay gap report that takes all of the requirements that I’ve just mentioned and the calculations that are detailed within those regulations. And with some configuration, that report will produce those six figures. So, what I’ll do now, I’m going to log into the system. I’m going to open that report up. And one of the things you’ll notice when I come to open this report is that it’s not called the mandatory gender pay gap report. I feel it’s important that we point this out. Like any report in CIPHR, the data it produces is only as good as the data that’s held within the system. We felt it could be misleading if we called it the mandatory gender pay gap reports when the report can’t confirm that the data within your system meets all of the requirements set out in the regulations. So, we’ve called it a gender pay gap report and there’s a lot of flexibility about when you run it as well.

Now, many of you who run reports from CIPHR, you’re probably used to doing that from the HR side of the system to help the run off flow more smoothly, I’ve taken the liberty of already running the reports. What would normally happen when I come to run the report, it would ask me for which subset of staff. The subset we’ll be using is own staff, and from that group would exclude anyone as these had in the regulations that’s on a reduced or nil rate of pay, as well as some people such as executives who don’t receive a normal pay. So, I’m going to open this report now. I’ve already run this, so, we’re not going to have to hold on for the data to produce, there was a lot of information in the reports. It can take a short while to run normally. Okay. And here it is, here’s the gender pay gap report that we’ve put together for you.

So, I mentioned that we hadn’t called it the mandatory gender pay gap report because of information that might not be available. And that information could be in areas such as payroll. So, we’re having conversations with our customers about where they’re storing data and seeing what we can do to bring that information into one place, into CIPHR, so, we can report on it. These figures you’re seeing now are from our demo system, with all of the information stored correctly and the report configured. Once I’ve configured the report once, all I need to do is run the report and it will produce an updated set of figures depending on the point in time you run it for etc. So, here we can see our gross hourly rates of pay, our bonus pay, and our quartiles. In terms of demonstrating the report, that’s really all there is to it. These are the figures that the government have asked for and the figures that the report will produce. Certainly, there’s an awful lot more going on behind the scenes, but that’s probably not for today’s discussion. If anyone’s got any questions about that we’ll be sharing contact details at the end of this session. Please, feel free to get in touch if you have any particular questions about how we’re calculating things.

But essentially what we’ve done is we’ve taken all of the calculations that the government detailed and we’ve put them into this report. We’ve already provided this, so, I think probably about 15 or 20 customers who tried it for us and giving us feedback. And we’ve built and grown this report with them. And from those 15 or 20 or so customers, we’ve seen that this report will work on average for about 80% of customers in its standard format. We can never be sure that everyone’s storing information in exactly the same way. So, we have to have conversations about how we configure this report and how you’re storing data as a part of the setup. So, I’m going to very quickly take you through that setup now. Obviously, if we come to import it into your live system, that would be a longer conversation somewhere in the region of 15 to 20 minutes. I’m not going to go through it in that much detail for this session but it’ll give you a taste of what that would entail.

So, once the reports are being imported into the system, we’d arrange a 15 or 20 minute call with a colleague of yours, perhaps yourselves, who has an understanding and knowledge of both the legislative requirements and your CIPHR system, particularly how you’re storing employee pay data, payments, and allowances. We go through this report with them once it’s being imported. And we use some quick guidelines here on how we identify whether particular payments and allowances fall into an ordinary pay element or a bonus pay element. These are the only two areas in the system that we can’t without configuration know, should be included in the figures in the main report or not.

So, if I take the payments area as an example, I’ve configured this for this demo system. We’ve taken all the available payment codes from that system. We’ve placed them into here and we go through each payment and identify whether it’s a paid component according to the legislation or a bonus component. Where it’s a bonus component, we have to tell this, in the report, what period the bonus is for. One of the things that’s come up in a number of conversations…it’s quite common, that you’ll have one payment for bonus as in this example, but will actually be paid for different periods for different staff. So, you might have an annual bonus, a monthly bonus. I suspect that when we reach those kinds of scenarios, we may well need to provide some additional services to help split those payments out to ensure that the report is as accurate as possible.

So, essentially it’s working with someone of your team to work through this list, identifying the various components and the periods that they’re relevant for. We do the same for allowances. And the numbers are automatically calculated. During those conversations, we should identify if the way you’re storing data might require some additional support from us. CIPHR are committed to help you get the most out of your system. And with this being the new legislative requirements, I think you’ll all be pleased to know that we have taken the decision to provide these reports at no cost to our customers. So, the standard reports in the format I’ve shown you now, are no cost to our customers. All you need to do, if you’d like to have it set up, is to contact the CIPHR Service Desk. Their email address, if you don’t already have that, is servicedesk@ciphr.com, and the telephone number is 0162-881-4040. We’ll share those details in a follow-up email, should you need to write that down again.

So, during those conversations, if things crop up such as you have a large volume of zero-hour staff, casual workers, etc., those scenarios are the ones I kind of mentioned earlier that we can’t accommodate for and expand your report. Everyone might record the information slightly differently. And because they’re recording it differently, we can’t build anything in the report to account for that. So, with the customers we’ve worked with so far, we’ve suggested somewhere in the region of half a day to a day’s consultancy where we’d work with you to understand how you’re storing the data, your particular setup with the records, and the staff you have, and the potential tweaks you might need to make to this report. Those kinds of conversations might not be an apparent until we have that initial conversation. You might already have a feeling now that perhaps some slight changes might need to be made. So, that’s the only area where we can see some additional services may be required. We hope, we feel, and you’d feel the same way that the savings year-on-year in being able to produce this information at a click of a mouse far outweighs in the end any potential cost.

Watch this on-demand webinar to learn more about the gender pay gap reporting requirements, and how CIPHR’s reporting tools could help you comply with these regulations.